Cattle Point juts out from the southwestern curve of San Juan
Island, a landscape of sandy bluffs rooted in algae-slick rocks.

Nine University of Washington researchers, clad in hip boots,
scramble over the outcroppings and wade through the tidal pools.
Under the lightly clouded spring sky, they're searching for the
sesame-seed-size egg masses of the Lacuna sea snail.

They stretch a yellow measuring tape through the most promising
pools and pull up samples of the black, brown and green algae
that carpets the rocks in a mottled shag.

"Hedophyllum, Phyllospadix, Ulva," one woman
calls out as she places each plant variety in a separate Zip-Loc
bag.

This is a rare scene in the San Juans.

Not because UW researchers are there -- the University has
had a research laboratory on San Juan Island since the turn of
the century -- but because the scientists in the field are undergraduate
students.

This is the first school year in many decades that the UW
has opened its Friday Harbor Laboratories to student "research
apprentices." Thirteen are participating in the trial year
of the program.

"I've loved marine life since I was little, and I always
wanted to be a marine biologist," said Margaret Grace, a
sophomore from Dartmouth who took time off to participate in
the UW's apprenticeship program, even though Dartmouth won't
accept the course credits.

"If I decide to go into biology for a career, then this
is way more valuable than a couple of course credits," she
said.

The apprentices are mostly from the UW's Seattle campus, with
a scattering of students from UW Tacoma and out of state.

With minimal publicity for the new program, the labs fielded
39 applicants for the current research apprenticeship. For those
accepted, it's a great deal. Students pay regular undergraduate
tuition and receive a $1,500 stipend to help offset the costs.

They spend a full quarter living and working at Friday Harbor
Laboratories.Schedules follow the tides. Labs are open
around the clock. And entire days are focused solely on research.

Far beyond the lab work most undergraduates do -- repeating
experiments that have been done a thousand times before -- these
apprentices delve into questions that have yet to be answered.

"You get to the frontiers of knowledge pretty fast,"
said Richard Strathmann, a zoology professor and assistant director
of the labs. "So, they're creating knowledge, rather than
just receiving it."

In Strathmann's group, the students are exploring how the
female Lacuna snail chooses where to lay her eggs.
Another group of six apprentices is studying the diversity of
marine life in the region.

In the process, the students will learn the basics of original
research: coming up with a defined research question, developing
an experiment to answer it, collecting specimens in the field
and analyzing the results.

It's a small group, but Dennis Willows, director of Friday
Harbor Laboratories, has proposed expanding the program to about
160 students a year, with research teams working in three- to
12-week stints.

He has applied for money from a special competitive fund.
The UW's provost and president will decide this summer which
applicants get the money.

Willows' obvious enthusiasm for the apprenticeships is driven
in part by personal experience.

Fresh out of college in 1963, he spent a rare summer at Friday
Harbor dissecting barnacles. One night, a "big, beautiful
sea slug" that lived in the lab died. At his mentor's suggestion,
Willows opened it up and discovered the largest brain cells in
the animal kingdom.

Using electrodes he was able to map the function of individual
brain cells in the nervous system, a discovery that has had broad
implications for the study of all manner of animal brains.

"Cells are cells are cells are cells," Willows says.
"Your brain cells, my brain cells and the brain cells of
that sea slug. Once I stick an electrode in them, you can't tell
the difference."

That post-college summer in the lab was his "metamorphosis."

"I've felt for a long time the university has underutilized
that transformational experience," Willows said.

Back in Strathmann's lab, the apprentices dump the
contents of the bags into shallow metal pans, carefully examining
each leaf for small brown snails and egg masses.

Strathmann designed the project to match his own expertise
so he can effectively guide the students, but in a relatively
unexplored area.

Along with the group project, the apprentices are working
on individual experiments, each exploring a different aspect
of the Lacuna's egg-laying behavior.

Grace and her partner plan to introduce predators into a tank
of snails that are laying eggs to see if it affects where the
female deposits the egg masses.

Tom Kang, a senior majoring in zoology, shows off a 2- by
4-foot tub. It is rigged with Plexiglas, a black plastic-covered
box and tubes spitting out sea water.

The experiment, designed by Kang and his partner, was created
to measure whether sunlight affects where the snails lay their
eggs. One piece of Plexiglas is clear, the other filters ultraviolet
rays, and the black box shuts the snails away from all light.

Kang applied to the program because he wanted a taste of what
real researchers do. Beyond that, he found a close-knit group
where he could work more closely with a professor than he thought
possible.

"For such a long time I felt like I was in such a big
university, with so little personal attention," Kang said.
"I feel real, real fortunate to have been able to come up
here."

The undergraduate research at Friday Harbor is hardly an isolated
case.

In the fall of 1997, UW president Richard McCormick used his
annual speech to the university to call for including more undergraduates
in research and other hands-on learning.

The goal was to double the 300 undergraduates involved in
intensive research work for credit or pay. In the last academic
year, the number hit 653.

The university's list of research opportunities has gone from
around 30 to 100. And this fall the course catalog will indicate
which courses have a research component.

"What faculty and the administration are doing is paving
the way," said Debra Friedman, associate provost for academic
planning. "We're tapping into what I believe is a latent
interest on the part of students to be involved in this exciting
research."

Tomorrow the UW will host the second annual Undergraduate
Research Symposium, created to highlight student projects.

Using Friday Harbor Laboratories to bring more scientific
inquiry into the lives of undergraduates is a natural.

The UW taught the first marine biology classes at Friday Harbor
in 1904, at what was then called the Puget Sound Biological Station.
It was a site rich in diverse marine animals and plants, and
was deemed perfect for research and as a summer training camp
for teachers.

The station quickly outgrew its 4-acre plot south of town,
and in 1921 U.S. President Warren G. Harding gave the UW a 484-acre
military preserve.

Early undergraduate apprentices include George Hitchings,
who in 1927 spent time at the labs measuring sea water chemistry.
He co-authored the published report and went on to become the
only UW undergraduate alumnus to later win the Nobel Prize.

More recently, the labs have offered undergraduates five-week
summer courses. In the spring quarter, 20 students are let into
an infamously intense 16-credit sequence on marine botany and
zoology.

The lab site is a remarkably untouched tract of Douglas
fir interspersed with the occasional cedar or madrona tree. Glacier-carved
rock pushes through along the shores, covered with a thin veil
of yellow and green moss. Deer nibble from the bushes around
the residences. Now and then a black fox saunters through.

The handful of faculty and graduate students who spend most
of the year at Friday Harbor wear marine biology shirts of the
inside-joke variety the way Dead Heads wear tie-dye.

Willows has a work shirt with "Institute on Intelligent
Systems" embroidered over the pocket, a reference to a Microsoft-sponsored
conference that explored what sea slugs can teach computer designers.
Strathmann's T-shirt from the Third International Larval Biology
Meeting in Melbourne, Australia, features a larval fish eating
Tazmania.

The decades-old dining room, where the undergraduates go for
both meals and classes, is a timbered hall with a pingpong table
at one end, a piano at the other.

It feels a lot like camp. Many students want to come back.

After she took the "Zo-Bot" course last spring,
Cynthia Catton was addicted to the close-knit community surrounded
by water and islands.

"Last year I was trying to think up some crazy, wild
scheme for how I could get back up here this year," said
Catton, a senior majoring in zoology. "They thought it up
for me."

Catton is now a research apprentice, delving into the mysteries
of sea worms. Armed with a flashlight and a turkey baster, Catton
has spent many nighttime hours sucking specimens from the waters
off the lab's dock. She has collected 41 different Polychaeta,
a class of many-footed worms.

As part of the research group studying marine invertebrate
biodiversity, Catton has her own table and microscope in Lab
1.

Shelves and sills are lined with jars of marine specimens,
and tanks in the center of the room hold all manner of sea life,
from flowery anemones to ribbonlike worms.

This group is working to improve the lab's dusty, old collection
of specimens, cataloging what's there and adding to it. As they
bring new animals back to the lab, they learn how to identify
species and even find a few that aren't in the books.

"We can go out on the dock and collect animals and have
no idea what they are -- despite the fact that there's been a
research lab here for 70, 80 years," said Bruno Pernet,
the postdoctoral researcher who is advising the students.

Catton, for one, has seen her comfort with research grow,
from the frustrating first weeks when she had no idea what she
was looking at.

"I think it would be really great to have more people
come up here and experience this," Catton says.